February 14, 2024

12:00pm, PST 1100 TLSB and Zoom

Whitney Nakashima
UCLA, Dept of EEB

" Understanding the past to conserve the future: integrating historical museum collections and avian conservation genomics. "

Jointly sponsored by EEB and the La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science

Description: Climate change is a major threat to biodiversity and is proceeding at an unprecedented rate. The US alone has estimated a loss of three billion birds since 1970. To protect species in the face of rapid environmental change, we need to base our conservation decisions on informed predictions of species response to changing climate regimes. By using modern and historical genomic, population, and climate data, La Kretz Center Postdoctoral Fellow Candidate Whitney Nakashima will investigate how three bird species in California have adapted to climate change in the past to protect them in the future. She will forecast species’ adaptive potential, identify where populations are most vulnerable to climate change, and locate climate refugia and connectivity corridors where species are likely to persist under future climate change scenarios. Working with her conservation partners at Audubon California and The Nature Conservancy, they will use these results to inform on-the-ground conservation actions to ensure their survival in a changing landscape.

Project Mentors: Dr. Felipe Zapata (Ph.D.; EEB) & Andrea Jones (Audubon CA)

Host: LaKretz Center for California Conservation Science